They want you relying on AI to do your reasoning, researching, analysis, and writing.
They want you to require easily controllable software to form your understanding of the world, and to express that understanding to others.
They can control the machines, but they can’t control the human mind. So they want you to abandon your mind for the machines.
They want you relying on artificial intelligence so you stop using your organic intelligence.
They want your critical thinking skills to atrophy.
They want your ability to locate and parse inconvenient pieces of information to deteriorate.
They want your inspiration and intuition to decay.
They want your sense of morality to waste and wither away.
They want you to perceive reality through interpretive lenses controlled by plutocratic tech companies, which are inextricably intertwined with the power structure of the Western Empire.
Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It’s the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge, which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats.
They want us to abandon our humanity for technology.
They don’t want us making our own art.
They don’t want us making our own music.
They don’t want us writing our own poetry.
They don’t want us contemplating philosophy for ourselves.
They don’t want us turning inwards and getting in touch with an authentic spirituality.
They want to replace the dynamic human spirit with predictable lines of code.
Our brains are conditioned to select for cognitive ease, and that’s what the AI merchants are selling us. The sales pitch is, “You don’t have to exert all that mental effort thinking new thoughts, learning new things, and expressing yourself creatively! This product will do it for you!”
But it comes at a cost. We have to trade in our ability to do those things for ourselves.
Historically, when a new technology has emerged, that kind of trade-off has been worth it. Not many people know how to start a fire with a bow drill anymore, but it rarely matters because modern technology has given us much more efficient ways of starting fires and keeping warm. It didn’t make sense to spend all the time and effort necessary to maintain our respective bow-drill skills once that technology showed up.
But this isn’t like that. We’re not talking about some obsolete skill we won’t need anymore thanks to modern technological development; we’re talking about our minds. Our creative expression. Our inspiration. Our very humanness.
Even if AI worked well (it doesn’t) and even if our plutocratic overlords could be trusted to interpret reality on our behalf (they can’t), those still wouldn’t be aspects of ourselves that we should want to relinquish.
In this oligarchic dystopia, it is an act of defiance just to insist upon maintaining your own cognitive faculties. Regularly exercising your own creativity, ingenuity, and mental effort is a small but meaningful rebellion.
So exercise it.
Don’t ask an AI to think something through for you. Work it out as best you can on your own. Even if the results are flawed, it’s still better than losing your ability to reason.
Don’t ask AI to create art or poetry for you. Make it yourself. Even if it’s crap, it’ll still be better than outsourcing your artistic capacity to a machine.
Don’t even run to a chatbot every time you need to find information about something. See if you can work your way through the old enshittified online search methods and find it for yourself. Our rulers are getting better and better at hiding inconvenient facts from us, so we’ve got to get better and better at finding them.
Get in touch with the fleshy, tactile experience of human embodiment, because they are trying to get you to abandon it.
Really feel your feet on the ground. The air in your lungs. The wind in your hair. Teach yourself to calm your restless mind and take in the beauty that’s all around you in every moment.
Repair the attention span that’s been shattered by smartphones and social media. Learn to meditate and focus on one thing for an extended period. Don’t look at your phone so much.
Read a book. A paper one, that you can touch and smell and hear the pages rustle as you turn them. If it’s an old one from the library or the used book store, that’s even better.
It doesn’t have to be a challenging book if your attention span is really shot. Start simple. A kids’ book. A comic book. Whatever you can manage. You’re putting yourself through cognitive restorative therapy. Your first steps don’t have to impress anybody.
Get in touch with your feelings—the ones you’ve been suppressing for years. Let them come out and have their say, listening to them like a loving parent to a trembling child.
Learn to cherish those moments in between all the highlights of your day. The time you spend at red lights, or waiting for the coffee to brew. There is staggering beauty packed into every moment on this earth; all you need to do is learn to notice it.
Embrace your humanity. Embrace your feelings. Embrace your flaws. Embrace your inefficiency. Embrace everything they’re trying to get you to turn away from.
What they are offering you is so very, very inferior to the immense treasure trove that you are swimming in just by existing as a human being on this planet.
You are a miracle. This life is a miracle.
Don’t let them hide this from you.